I’m recognizing that wisdom isn’t as much about acquiring knowledge as it is about consistently putting into practice what I already know. I’ve been trying it out lately, felt like it’s about that time. It means not going for a second plate when I know I’m already full. Not reaching for that extra drink. Going the fuck to sleep instead of squeezing in that extra episode. Not tapping that app icon just because there’s a red dot with a number on the corner. Just slowing down in general.
Respecting the thresholds of my appetite, my mental clarity, my wakefulness, my attention, my pace, has been a challenge for someone like me who has always placed emphasis on being up on that new shit. To be a curator, a tastemaker, and, these days it seems, to just be a relevant member of society, so much currency is placed on being able to say “oh, you haven’t heard about woompty woomp?” But my past few months of intentionally (not always successfully) limiting my internet consumption, while also being more selective of the foods, liquids, and substances I put into my body, have heightened my sensitivity. And just like how you can get hella faded on a single drink after a dry season, lately I’ve returned to social media with a low tolerance for information. Whether they’re important headlines or petty threads, all of this information is pointless when passed through instead of processed. These bits of knowledge that lack wisdom are like empty carbs – I feel them course through my veins, they make my eyes sore when I go to bed, and linger in my skull when I awaken.
(The only social consequences of not being up on every headline this past month have been 1) feeling dumb when I didn’t know Beyoncé was headlining Coachella, and 2) accidentally giving a shout out to Junot Diaz this past weekend. If neither of these references mean anything to you, it’s likely that you’ve just been better at resisting FB than I have.)
A trope of both intellectual and spiritual wisdom that often eludes me is the ability to approach life like a child. For me, the challenge hasn’t been in staying curious, or open, or questioning. My challenge has been in staying prolific with the right thing. Since I was a kid, I’ve been prolific in one thing or another, whether it was drawing, writing, or these days writing emails (a sucky thing to be prolific with). Lately I’ve also been prolific with cooking, something that I do every day that I can, even though it siphons at least two hours that could otherwise be a lot more productive. I should clarify that these two terms are not synonyms. Productivity, even when self-driven, pleases an external entity. It is a contribution to society, a token of success in which your value is appraised by your output. Prolificity, on the other hand, isn’t always necessarily “productive.” In fact, when my productivity equates to my prolificity, I’m trapped. My personal fulfillment is measured by a rubric that remains elusive and opaque, in that it’s via the perceived judgement of others. But to be unproductively prolific is to be self-sufficient, is to be self-fulfilled, is to be free.
This blog, gutted of analytics, comments, and any other imposed rubrics of productive success, has been the grounds for cultivating wisdom that I, in my unwiseness, keep neglecting. I desperately want to commit to writing more regularly in the same way that I want to do other simple tasks that for some reason seem so harrowing – eating slower, making more eye contact, listening deeply. It’s here that I would typically find external players to hold me accountable, but that wouldn’t really be the point, would it? This week, while in the Bay and taking a day between traveling for this endless parade of conferences I’ve been on, my mom asked, “When do you find time to process it all?” She quit her job a year and a half ago and has been doing nothing but processing. She’s been incredibly unproductive but extremely prolific – I’ve never witnessed my mom with thoughts and ideas so well-packaged. Even after these four short paragraphs, I’m beginning to feel my spine straighten, my blood flow, my mind clear. Maybe it’s all in my head. But maybe that’s all that matters.